Fact, fiction, and the books of Madeleine L’Engle.

My copy was blue. The book was a small Scholastic paperback, and on the cover was a trio of pale-green concentric circles. They looked like radio waves, or the kind of design you could get by fiddling around with a Spirograph set. In one of the circles was the silhouette of a girl, and, in another, a matching image of a little boy.

The book was “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Madeleine L’Engle. Published in 1962, it is—depending on how you look at it—science fiction, a warm tale of family life, a response to the Cold War, a book about a search for a father, a feminist tract, a religious fable, a coming-of-age novel, a work of Satanism, or a prescient meditation on the future of the United States after the Kennedy assassination. When I first read it, in 1967, at the age of eight, I was innocent of any of this, and I had no idea that the story was also about the author. The girl in the circle was her childhood self, lostand lonely in space. But for L’Engle, even more than for Meg Murry, who with her brother Charles Wallace is travelling, according to my edition’s back-flap copy, “through a wrinkle in time, to the deadly unknown terrors beyond the tesseract!,” it had been even more perilous, because she had no grave, precocious little boy to accompany her. I knew even less that those closest to Madeleine L’Engle considered her science fiction to be the least fantastical of her more than fifty books, which, in addition to her novels, include poetry, meditations, and memoirs.

I once asked L’Engle to define “science fiction.” She replied, “Isn’t everything?” On another occasion, in the vast, sunny apartment in a building on West End Avenue where she has lived since 1960, and where she and her late husband, the actor Hugh Franklin, brought up their three children, she offered an example. “I was standing right there, carrying a plate of cold cuts,” she said, pointing at a swinging door between the dining room and the pantry. “And I swooped into the pantry, bang, and got a black eye. It was exactly as if someone pushed me.” At eighty-five, L’Engle is a formidable figure. She is five feet nine in her stocking feet, and uses a wheelchair owing to a broken hip. She has a birdlike head, a sharp nose, and an air of helpless innocence that is almost entirely put on. She wore a loose-fitting dress in one of her favorite colors, peacock blue. “Most likely,” she continued firmly, “it was a poltergeist. There must have been a teen-age girl in the house. All that energy! They create the best atmosphere for them, you know. We don’t know how to catch and harness it.” She nodded. “Too true of most things.”

“A Wrinkle in Time” is about Meg Murry and her little brother Charles Wallace, and their search for their father, who has disappeared. Meg and Charles Wallace live in a big, drafty New England house on a wooded hill. Meg, at about twelve, is untidy, unattractive, temperamental, and surly at school. She fights with the school bully, who makes rude remarks about Charles Wallace, who, according to the village gossips, “is not quite bright.” She bridles at whispers that her father may not come back, even though she knows he will: her mother, a brilliant, beautiful scientist, has told her so. And she knows there’s nothing wrong with Charles Wallace. He is a small, blond, preternaturally intelligent four-year-old, who was silent until he began to speak in complete, complicated sentences. He also has second sight.

The book opens on a stormy night. “I knew you’d be down,” Charles Wallace says to Meg as midnight nears. There is a strange sound at the kitchen door, and, when Mrs. Murry opens it, in tumbles a very old, cheerful woman who accepts a sandwich, and leaves just as suddenly, in a heave of drenched outer garments, saying in a by-the-by sort of way, “There is such a thing as a tesseract.”

Mrs. Murry blanches. Before Mr. Murry disappeared, the two of them had been playing around with a way to square the fourth dimension. Or, as Charles Wallace explains to Meg:

Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

The next day, Meg and Charles Wallace hike into the woods in search of the woman, and run into an older, popular boy from school named Calvin O’Keefe, who has no idea why he has come to their wood, except that, as he puts it, “When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me.” (Calvin is psychic, too. In L’Engle’s “The Arm of the Starfish,” Meg and Calvin surface again, grown up—Calvin’s a biologist, studying regeneration theory; he and Meg are married, and they have a daughter called Polyhymnia.)

The three children are taken in hand by the visitor, Mrs. Whatsit, and her two weird sisters, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, who turn out not to be kind old ladies but, rather, the corporeal emanation of stars who gave up their lives fighting the Dark Thing, which threatens to overcome the universe. Mrs. Whatsit is sensible; Mrs. Who is given to quoting—Cervantes, Goethe, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Jesus; Mrs. Which stammers. They have come to help the children find their father, who, after working in New Mexico and “at Cape Canaveral,” is lost in space. Off they go, leapfrogging from one galaxy to another until they land on Camazotz, where life is so regulated that children bounce their balls in unison.

Their father is here. They must descend into the town to find him. Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit, Glindas in a murky Oz, depart. In the end, Meg discovers that it is only by using her faults—her stubbornness, her willfulness, her unruly heart—that she can rescue her father, and ultimately Charles Wallace, from the planet where the Dark Thing has won.

Catherine Hand, who is an executive producer of a made-for-television version of “A Wrinkle in Time,” which is scheduled to air next month on ABC, fell in love with the book when she was ten. She says, “The engine that drives it is Meg’s inner life, and it’s astonishing, because here is a girl who at that moment is stronger than her father. For some of us, it planted the seeds of the women’s movement. I have had wonderful conversations with Madeleine, as a friend, who is, of course, Meg.”

Robert Giroux, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which first published “A Wrinkle in Time,” says, “Madeleine L’Engle? She’s an unusual woman, brilliant intellectually. A really superior person. She’s what you used to call a bluestocking. I’ve worked with T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, and so on, but my young relatives all say, ‘Oh, Madeleine L’Engle!’ “

The hardcover edition of “A Wrinkle in Time” is now in its sixty-seventh printing, and continues to sell about fifteen thousand copies annually. (L’Engle says that she had a clause in her contract that Farrar, Straus had the rights to “A Wrinkle in Time” in perpetuity in the universe, but not on Andromeda.) More than six million copies of the paperback are currently in circulation.

More than most writers, L’Engle has engaged with her readers. Until about five years ago, she was a tireless lecturer and teacher, annually accepting dozens of invitations to speak, on writing, family life, and faith—L’Engle has been a devout Anglican for most of her adult life—and she has often received more than a hundred letters from readers in a week. (Her grandchildren, Léna Roy and Charlotte and Edward Jones, now handle most of her correspondence.) One evening at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where L’Engle has been the librarian for forty years, an Evensong service was held to celebrate her contribution to literature for children. Scores of strangers waited to greet her—mainly middle-aged women, some with children in tow, but men, too. What they said was “Thank you. You changed my life.”

Of course, people say that all the time about beloved writers. As for me, I kept that copy of “A Wrinkle in Time.” One way or another, I read it every year. More recently, I’ve read it aloud to my children. “A Wrinkle in Time,” and a number of L’Engle’s other books, became inextricably part of who I was. They influenced how I thought about religion and politics, about physics and mystery, and how I imagined what family life could be.

It wasn’t just me. When I was in college, I remember a friend saying to me, “There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L’Engle when they were small, and those who didn’t.”

“What did you read as a child?” I asked L’Engle one afternoon. I had brought along my daughter, Rose, to see her, and they were playing Scrabble. “I was a voracious reader,” she said, counting out tiles. “My grandfather used to send me a magazine called Chatterbox, from England, which I loved. And I read ‘Emily of New Moon,’ by L. M. Montgomery. She had a dying father, and so did I. She wrote, and so did I. I read that book over and over.” L’Engle also read George MacDonald, the Christian fantasist. As a writer, she shares with MacDonald, as well as with C. S. Lewis, another favorite, the sense that there is a parallel universe, and an active belief in the presence of good and evil. She refuses to distinguish between children’s and adult literature, and she has consistently resisted being labelled a “children’s-book writer.” When people ask her how to write for children, her answer is always the same: “Write your story.”

She looked down at the board. So far, the tiles spelled out “born,” “tree,” “nag,” and “wrath.” “Look at that,” she said, an owlish grin spreading across her face. “It’s the Garden of Eden!” Then she looked at Rose sharply. “You like to write stories, don’t you? When I was a little girl, I was in a play. I chose to be one of the girls playing timbrels on the way to the guillotine.”

Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Charles Wadsworth Camp, a Princeton man and First World War veteran, whose family had a big country place in New Jersey, called Crosswicks. In Jacksonville society, the Barnett family was legendary: Madeleine’s grandfather, Bion Barnett, the chairman of the board of Jacksonville’s Barnett Bank, had run off with a woman to the South of France, leaving behind a note on the mantel. Her grandmother, Caroline Hallows L’Engle, never recovered from the blow.

“The Barnett scandal was just incredible for Jacksonville,” Francis Mason says. Mason, who is now in his eighties, is Madeleine’s cousin on her father’s side. He is the editor of Ballet Review and the chairman of the board of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. He recalls, “England had the Windsors, we had the Barnetts. In Jacksonville, we called Bion Barnett ‘King Tut.’ “

Madeleine’s parents were the kind of couple whose devotion to each other can stymie children. They rose late, read aloud to each other, and went out most nights. In their apartment on the East Side, Madeleine ate her meals on a tray in her room. Her mother played the piano; her father, after a stint as a foreign correspondent, wrote potboilers. At school, she was terrible at sports and, she says, thought to be stupid (though at least one of her school reports belies this); like Meg Murry, she felt gangly, needy, bullied, and dismayed. She hated the school so much that to this day she won’t say which one it was. Her granddaughter Charlotte Jones recalls that when she herself was in private school in New York, half a century later, she was terrified of playing competitive sports: any girls’ school could be that school, still full of tormentors.

One morning in Switzerland, at the end of a summer spent abroad, when Madeleine was twelve years old, her parents drove through the gates of Chatelard, a boarding school for girls, introduced her to the headmistress, and left her there. She was completely unprepared. “I shook hands with the matron, and they vanished,” L’Engle said. She was sitting in her high-back wing chair in the West End Avenue apartment. “My parents had diametrically opposed views on how to raise me. In New York, even once they knew the school wasn’t the right place for me my father kept me there, to teach my mother a lesson, because it had been her idea.”

In addition to her novels, L’Engle is the author of several books of memoirs, including “The Crosswicks Journal,” which was published in several volumes and is about her life in Connecticut, and includes the book “Two-Part Invention,” which tells the story of her marriage to Hugh Franklin. In these accounts, young Madeleine is sent to boarding school because her father was gassed in the war. He needs to travel endlessly in search of air clear enough for him to breathe. She knows that she is loved, though: she stays with her parents during school holidays. One day, however, she told me that she almost never saw her parents during school vacations. She spent the holidays in Provence, with her grandfather. During the long afternoons, she read his collection of Punch.

When Madeleine was about fifteen, her parents returned from Europe—the search for clear air apparently abandoned—and went to live in Jacksonville. After the move, she was released from Chatelard and sent to Ashley Hall, in Charleston. Of her peregrinations, her Jacksonville relatives said, “Where have they shipped that girl off to now?” Madeleine, in turn, found Florida stultifying and surreal: one afternoon, she watched an alligator pick its way up the porch steps. But, to her surprise, she adored Ashley Hall. “We did Shakespeare, and the Chester Cycle. We had a Miss McBee, who was mad about the theatre. The teachers thought I was bright, and I was elected class president. It was extraordinary.” During her last year, her father caught pneumonia, and, according to L’Engle, his weakened lungs gave out. Francis Mason was fifteen years old, and the funeral was at his family’s house in Jacksonville.

Mason, who later became a close friend of George Balanchine, is accustomed to larger-than-life personalities. He told me, “I knew the saga. Uncle Charles was very exotic. He used to smoke Rameses cigarettes. And he used to drink a lot. He was a great Princetonian, and he went up to a game and caught a cold and died. My mother was brokenhearted.”

But weren’t Charles’s lungs already damaged? I asked Mason. “No, Uncle Charles was not ailing in his life. He was a big, handsome man in a white linen suit smoking cigarettes on the porch and drinking whiskey. He was a favorite of my mother’s, and she was a talker, and she never mentioned anything about him being gassed in the war.”

L’Engle went on to Smith College. The novelist Mary Ellen Chase, with whom she studied, divided English literature into three parts: Major, Minor, and Mediocre. As L’Engle recalled, “We were all quite vocal about not wanting to be mediocre!” She had already decided that she was going to be a famous writer. “It didn’t occur to me that there was an alternative career,” she said. “I loved writing dramatic monologues; in class, I did Cerberus, spontaneously.”

“It was the unsubstantiated rumors that attracted me to you in the first place.”

On odd weekends she took the train down to Germantown, Pennsylvania, where cousins on her father’s side held a perpetual open house. There were three sisters. L’Engle was closest to Starr, who reviewed books and gave her new ones to read; a fourth sister, Margaret Lawrence, an actress, had been shot dead by her lover. When L’Engle graduated, she went back to New York.

“I escaped Jacksonville,” L’Engle said with a flourish. “I lived first at 43 West Ninth Street. Then I moved to West Twelfth, and then I made a big move, to 32 West Tenth. Leonard Bernstein lived upstairs, with two little babies, and we thought of switching so they wouldn’t have to carry the carriage up the steps. We could eat at the Golden Eagle on Tenth Avenue—it was one dollar for spaghetti with wine, a dollar twenty-five without. It was 1941, and I got a job through the American Theatre Wing selling war bonds during intermissions on Broadway. I took acting lessons from Morris Carnovsky—a quarter per lesson.”

In the winter of 1942, L’Engle auditioned for the actors Eva Le Gallienne, who had founded the Civic Repertory Theatre, and Joseph Schildkraut with a monologue put together from the letters of Katherine Mansfield. Tall and gawky, she was cast in a small part in “Uncle Harry,” and then, in the summer of 1943, as a walk-on in “The Cherry Orchard.” The show went on tour, and she roomed with the young Anne Jackson.

“Madeleine was a grown-up kid,” Jackson told me. “She was fearless and grand, but then she would confide in one, like a little girl. She amused and delighted and awed me. After her bath, she would walk naked around the room with only her beads on. And once when I was ill she tried to make me feel better by spraying perfume all over the room, which made me feel worse!” Jackson laughed. “She was zany. But I always got the sense that she’d been trained to be a lady, which meant she was not so at ease with her emotions. There was something ethereal about her. She had a terrible time having babies, for instance, but she’s wonderfully domestic: she’s a terrific cook. And she’s terrifically loyal. After she broke her hip, she came to see me in a play in a wheelchair. It was as if she was playing a part—a person in a wheelchair.”

Hugh Franklin, a handsome young actor from Tulsa, had been cast in the role of Petya Trofimov, the student. Madeleine was besotted; it seemed he was, too. Then he vanished. She was heartbroken. He surfaced, briefly, the following summer, and then turned up again in the winter and proposed to her. They were married in 1946. In “Two-Part Invention,” which came out after Franklin died, of cancer, in 1986, L’Engle wrote, “There in the chapel of the church, Hugh and I made promises, promises which for forty years we have, by some grace, been able to keep.” The memoir testifies to the idea that two vibrant, curious people can, over the decades, maintain a marriage that is imaginative, deeply sustaining, and alive.

Of the three children of that marriage, two survive: Josephine Jones is a psychotherapist, and Maria Rooney is a photographer; Bion Franklin died at age forty-seven, in 1999, of the effects of long-term alcoholism. L’Engle’s children and grandchildren—who love her deeply, but with a kind of desperate frustration spliced with resentment—revile “Two-Part Invention.” Indeed, L’Engle’s family habitually refer to all her memoirs as “pure fiction,” and, conversely, consider her novels to be the most autobiographical—though to them equally invasive—of her books. (Naturally, L’Engle’s children are not the only writer’s children who feel that by using them as copy their mother or father has mortgaged their privacy.) When Josephine Jones read “Two-Part Invention,” she thought, Who the hell is she talking about? Alan Jones, the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who was married to Josephine for many years, told me, “The matriarch of the family is the guardian of the family narrative, and if that person is a writer . . . One of the things Madeleine used to say to me is ‘It’s true, it’s in my journals,’ which was a hilarious statement. Some of her books were good bullshit, if you don’t know the family. Spaghetti on the stove, Bach on the phonograph, that’s all true. But there was this tremendous fissure.”

Maria Rooney calls “Two-Part Invention” “a lovely fairy tale.” She says, “Madeleine knows she’s had an enormous influence. I think it snowballs. It would be hard for her to say, ‘I made mistakes. Like other mortals.’ “

There is a line by the poet Elinor Wylie that L’Engle particularly likes: “Now let no charitable hope / Confuse my mind with images.” It has, she says, some indestructible naïve power. One afternoon, in her living room, while we were talking about the past, she fell momentarily silent. In the pause, I read the spines of the books on the bookcase shelf directly behind her head: “Tituba of Salem Village,” by Ann Petry; “Bruno’s Dream,” by Iris Murdoch; “Hildegarde, The Last Year”; Susan Sontag’s “Death Kit”; and a row of six books by Rumer Godden.

At last she said, “When I was first in the cathedral library, I had my dog Oliver with me. There was a woman who used to come in he didn’t like. One day, she showed up on the close with a knife. He knew she had that knife, and he wouldn’t let her in the door.” She narrowed her eyes. “This is the first time I haven’t had a dog.” She thought for a minute, and then said, “I am very impressed with the mind’s ability to make a complete shift, to keep a corner free. I like the fact that the universe is alive, that it is moving and growing. Hearing yourself think—that’s really what it is for a writer.”

The summer after Hugh and Madeleine were married, they bought a dilapidated farmhouse in Goshen, in northwest Connecticut. Josephine, born in 1947, was three years old when they moved permanently to the house, which they called Crosswicks. Bion was born just over a year later. Money was short. Hugh put his acting career aside, and the Franklins took over the derelict local general store, and made a go of it. In 1956, they adopted a little girl, Maria; her parents, close friends of theirs, had both died suddenly. L’Engle wrote early in the morning and late at night, and the white farmhouse became the proto-setting for the books that made her reputation: “A Wrinkle in Time” and the stories about the Austin family, the first of which, “Meet the Austins,” was published in 1960, two years before “Wrinkle.” L’Engle said, “It was during that decade when we were poised for nuclear war. We thought Goshen would be a better, safer place for the children to grow up. Then we realized there was no safe place—we had a feeling of imminent disaster—but we tried anyway, for the children, to create that safe place. I was conscious of creating it in life, and the books were echoing what that life was like.”

“Meet the Austins” is about a family like the Franklins and the Murrys, who live in a white farmhouse on a hill in Connecticut. There are four children: John; Vicky, who wants to be a writer; Suzy; and Rob, a small blond boy whose powers of empathy, if not quite up to Charles Wallace’s, are nevertheless remarkable. Mrs. Austin—who is also named Vicky—is fair-minded, concerned, in love with her husband, and a good cook. The children’s father, Wally (certain names run in L’Engle’s family), is an overworked, beloved country doctor.

Into this happy world springs disaster. A little girl the Austins know, Maggy Hamilton, is orphaned, and comes to live with them. Alas, poor Maggy, whose only relation is a distant, rich grandfather, is spoiled, deceitful, and destructive. She tells lies and tears Rob’s beloved stuffed animal, Elephant’s Child. Darkness is unleashed: the children argue, Dr. Austin snaps at his wife, Vicky breaks her arm. Mirabile dictu, by the second Austin book Maggy is made to disappear through a second, convenient adoption.

“Meet the Austins” has been continuously in print since its publication. Maria Rooney told me, “I hated the Austin books. Everyone who reads them says, ‘How could she have done that?’ “

Rooney, who recalls her childhood relationship with her mother as difficult, is now married to an architect, and has two teen-age boys of her own. In recent years she has collaborated with L’Engle on a series of photography books about mothers and their children. She shook her head, and said, “No, I’m not filled with bitterness now. She’s such a storyteller that she gets confused about what really happened.”

On Maundy Thursday, a priest, performing an ancient Easter rite, came to L’Engle’s apartment to wash her feet. “All Angels comes to me,” she explained, naming a nearby Episcopal church. “I was thinking just now of Daniel: ‘Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.’ Martin Buber writes about what goes on in the heart, and we’re not good at admitting what goes on in the heart. It’s not always pretty.” Once, when I’d asked L’Engle about the gestation of Maggy Hamilton, she said, “Maggy has always been Maggy, not Maria. People have always tried to identify her with Maria, but it’s not true. We didn’t have a large family, and that was perhaps just as well; my characters are more alive to me than the people they are based on.”

Now, she looked at me sternly over her teacup. “However, I don’t like this current spate of children exposing their parents. I don’t think certain things need to be discussed. Why should I care about anyone’s bedding down? You know more about Tolstoy from walking through his books.” She took a sip, and then said, “Well, Maria. The universe proved itself unreliable when her parents died, so she imagined she could do whatever she wanted in an unreliable universe. I read ‘The Bad Seed,’ and I got it out of the house because I was afraid she might read it.” Later, she told me, “I think I put in a disclaimer somewhere where I say that, of course, real people are more complicated than they are in books. Didn’t I do that?”

In 1960, “Meet the Austins” had come out to favorable reviews but small young-adult market sales, and “A Wrinkle in Time,” despite the best efforts of L’Engle’s agent, Theron Raines, could not find a publisher. The manuscript was rejected repeatedly. To Raines, the problem with the book was the religious element. (It may have been that the potential for identifying Charles Wallace as a type of Christ child made people uncomfortable.) But Raines loved it. “Here was a genuine storytelling voice, and I thought it was wonderful,” he told me. “I remember one publisher saying to me that he thought he might be turning down ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ “ But Raines pressed on, and sent the manuscript to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “The reason John Farrar bought it is he was a very religious man and went to church; he once told me that in the early days it paid for the rent on the offices.”

In 1963, after a flux of laudatory reviews (Saturday Review announced, “It has the general appearance of being science fiction but it is not. . . . There is mystery, mysticism, a feeling of indefinable brooding horror . . . original, different, exciting”), “A Wrinkle in Time” won the Newbery Medal, the highest honor for a work of fiction for children. This was despite the fact that some Christian fundamentalists initially tried to ban it. According to L’Engle, “They said it wasn’t a Christian book. I said, ‘Quite right.’ I wasn’t trying to write a Christian book. But, of course, it is. So is ‘Robin Hood.’ The Mrs. Ws witches? They’re guardian angels!”

At Farrar, Straus, Sandra Jordan became, for a time, L’Engle’s editor. Like Anne Jackson, she found her a winning mixture of grand dame and vulnerability. “We told each other dirty jokes,” Jordan recalled, laughing. “There was one about the Holy Grail—that was part of our bonding.” L’Engle was working on a sequel to “A Wrinkle in Time,” the book that became “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” (there are four books in the Time series). Jordan said, “She would call and say, ‘Would Charles Wallace do this?’ And we would go paragraph by paragraph, and line by line.”

For L’Engle, the alchemy worked. Jordan continued, “I remember with ‘Ring of Endless Light’ “—the fourth book in the Austin series—“I felt Vicky, who even more than Meg Murry is Madeleine’s alter ego, was being insufferable. She was always right and everyone else was wrong. It was fatiguing. And Madeleine and I had a big talk about the vanity of being good, the pitfalls, which led to the scene with Grandfather, when he tells Vicky that other men’s burdens are not your burdens. Madeleine had turned it around and spun straw into gold.”

In the winter of 1960, the Franklins had moved back to the city, to the building on West End Avenue. Before the move, the family went on a cross-country trip, which Madeleine fictionalized in her second book about the Austins, “The Moon by Night.” Hugh had begun to work in the theatre again, and in television; in 1970, he was cast as Dr. Charles Tyler in a new soap opera called “All My Children,” a role that he played for fourteen years. Here, too, fiction and reality blurred. Wally Austin-cum-Hugh Franklin is a doctor; now, Hugh was playing a doctor on a hugely popular show.

Robert Lescher, who succeeded Theron Raines as L’Engle’s agent, said, “One of the interesting things is that they both had different constituencies. They would go somewhere, and only one of them would be recognized. I think they were mutually supportive to an unusual degree. But Hugh was not, I’d say, as abrasive a personality.”

Despite outward appearances, and what L’Engle was recounting in her journals, by the seventies the marriage was troubled. Friends noticed that Hugh was drinking heavily, and he was embroiled in at least two affairs, one of which, according to Josephine Jones, lasted until his death. When I asked L’Engle about her marriage, she said, “Hugh was lucky for an actor—he was tall, good-looking, and he didn’t drink.” Later, she added, “But he was anything but perfect. In forty years, we had something like four perfect minutes.”

Around the same time, L’Engle, while working on a children’s Christmas pageant, met Canon Edward Nason West, an Anglican priest affiliated with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. On the cathedral close, where eccentricity is prima facie, Canon West, brilliant, irascible, and charismatic, stood out: one old friend describes him as “lovely and horrendous.” L’Engle adored him. West became her spiritual adviser, confidant, trusted reader, and the model for Canon Tallis, who first appears as presiding magus in her Murry-family novel “The Arm of the Starfish.” On West’s suggestion, she delivered what became an annual tradition of Advent sermons at the cathedral about the Christmas story—the gist of which fit into what Charlotte Jones calls “Madeleine’s ‘It doesn’t have to be true to be true’ thing.” The sermons—moving, allusory, and intricately reasoned—led to L’Engle’s second career, as a public speaker, which often took her away from home. (Her meditations also inspired an outpouring of religious poetry and musings, which are now published by Waterbrook Press.)

During those years, Josephine miscarried, and L’Engle wrote about it, in manuscript. Alan and Josephine asked her to take it out. She did, finally, but she didn’t understand why they wanted her to. Other members of the family say, too, that there were incidents in their own lives—in some cases the usual growing pains, and in others what they considered singular, traumatic events—that L’Engle appropriated and used in her novels or revealed in “The Crosswicks Journal.” Her own troubles, however, were excised or trimmed to fit. “Think of it,” Alan Jones said. “The confirmed construction of the self by means of narrative. Golly, what a job.”

“You get ten vacation days, three personal days, and two technical-difficulties days.”

On West End Avenue, piles of paperback mysteries teeter by L’Engle’s bed. She’ll read any mystery, unless she knows that the plot revolves around a dead child. In her dressing gown, looking her most imperious, she pointed to a Chinese highboy across the room, and said, “It was in an antique shop in London. The Queen Mother was looking at it, but my step-grandmother bought it right out from under her nose. I’ve always thought she’d make a good novel, but you don’t write about anything too close.”

For L’Engle, the truth is in the telling. In the long dream of her fiction, in which the search for the father is central, that figure changes from an ineffectual father to a fraudulent—or absent—father. In some later novels, the father is dispensed with altogether and replaced by an Anglican priest. But in that dream, which hopscotches through time and space, and in which figures familiar from one book often appear, in odd circumstances, in another, there are two characters who do not grow up. The first is the bookish, awkward Vicky Austin, the girl who wants to become a writer. The second is Charles Wallace Murry and his Austin counterpart, Rob, who are essentially the same child. When I mentioned to Charlotte Jones that Vicky is stuck in time, and asked why L’Engle never shows us who Vicky became, she said simply, “Gran can’t. I’ve asked her about it. Vicky is the character who’s closest to her, to who she was as a child, and it would mean looking at her own life in a way she’s not prepared to do. Or not willing to do.”

Charlotte paused. “One thing I respect about Gran is that she’s seamless. She is able to put many complicated things together and make them whole, but she wasn’t able to do that with Vicky, or with Charles Wallace, ultimately, or, of course, with Bion, who to her was a combination of Charles Wallace and Rob Austin. She will not admit he died of alcoholism. She will not budge, and she will not talk about it. Bion loathed and detested the Austins.”

Bion Franklin, who wanted to be a writer, lived for almost all his adult life at Crosswicks with his wife, Laurie, a doctor. According to the family, he is the person for whom L’Engle’s insistence on blurring fiction and reality had the most disastrous consequences. L’Engle’s former agent, Theron Raines, who met Bion when he was four or five, remembers him as beautiful and sweet. Everyone in L’Engle’s family is large—they’re big-boned people—but in the snapshots taken of Bion in the years before he died, he is beyond big, or just heavy: he looks smeared. “It’s hard,” Maria Rooney said, “to be the magic child.”

It was a stormy June day. I had gone to Crosswicks with my children to visit L’Engle. Laurie Franklin, Bion’s widow, and Josephine Jones showed me a room above the garage, where L’Engle used to write. No one had cleaned it in a very long time. Outside, beyond a meadow, were the Murrys’ woods, and the star-watching rock from the Austin-family stories. Jones said, “I have a feeling still that this is forbidden. I’m not supposed to be up here, and once in a while I still get this hit.”

During the year, Jones, who lives in her own house in northwest Connecticut, travels to New York City every other weekend to see her mother. She said, “I went through a time fairly recently when I wanted my mother to know that I knew her parents hadn’t been good parents to her. I often wonder if she had grown up in a different family, rather than in a family that was emotionally deprived, what kind of childhood we would have had.”

“Bion wouldn’t read her books,” Franklin said.

“Bion would not leave home,” Jones added.

Shrieks of laughter came from an indoor swimming pool, where my children were swimming with L’Engle’s great-grandchildren.

L’Engle now lives across the road when she is here during the summer, in a spacious, one-story house that she built a few years ago, for when she would no longer be able to climb the stairs at Crosswicks. (“Old age,” she likes to say, quoting Bette Davis, “is not for sissies.”) The house is airy and light, and the living-room windows have a view of her meadow. In the late afternoon, the grass turns from green to gold. Throughout the summer, mail from fans—sometimes addressed simply to “Madeleine L’Engle, Crosswicks”—piles up here, too.

One evening, while we were having supper together, I asked L’Engle about her relationship with her readers. “It scares me shitless!” she said. “Because it’s a responsibility. Over time, someone reads your book, and something happens. People want intimacy, and I have a terrible time saying no.” When people tell her, “You’ve helped me grow up, you’re my mother,” she tends to brush it off: her job, as she sees it, is to write stories, not to be known. (About her own children, she has said, “My children want Mama to be Mama, and if I’m known it takes me away from them.”)

In her living room, she directed her gaze to a spot beside my chair. “Now, you know an alligator comes to visit. His name is Alastair.”

Marianne Moore, I mentioned, had a pet alligator when she was a child.

“Did she? How wonderful. Then I’m certain it returned to her, too, in old age. Mine is from Jacksonville.”

She turned to look at me. “I think I’m less judgmental now. I accept people as they are. And I’m able to think more freely about my childhood.” Later, she added, “My father was glamorous, and he seemed that way because, I think, he was pretty glamorous. Just because I know his faults now doesn’t mean he wasn’t glamorous.”

She admits, though, that the portraits in her memoirs are idealized: “I can’t put disturbing things about people into print.” In fiction, she is freer. “If I’m working on a piece of fiction,” she told me, “I do not write from life. I think that my characters came to me because I didn’t have any family, and I wanted to have a family, and it was the only way I could get it.”

“But you had your own family,” I said.

“Even so, writing the stories came out of my childhood experiences.”

Time, for L’Engle, is accordion- pleated. She elaborated, “When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t exist until it’s folded—or it’s a story without a book.”

But, I asked, is there a difference between fiction and nonfiction? “Not much,” she said, shrugging. It was a long shrug, the wishbone of her shoulders pulled up almost to her ears. “Because there’s really no such thing as nonfiction. When people read your books, they think they know everything, but they don’t. Writing is like a fairy tale. It happens elsewhere.” She paused. “I had a friend, who died. She thought she could control everything. See? The story creeps up whether we want it to or not.” ♦